That said, just because the concept of the socially constructed self is a pawn in an impossible game, where players believe themselves capable of objectifying and transcending culture and their selves in order to (re)construct and re-present them on a page, that doesn’t mean we should throw out all practices that are part of the processes of self-examination and social-awareness. Instead, the question intensifies: how can we, teachers of the essay, empower student essayists without asking them to practice the impossible, transcendent move that is enabled by a belief in an essential self or a socially constructed self?
I don’t think the answer to this problem lies in identifying social categories, reversing power structures, or trying/hoping to write from outside of our own
social construction. In fact, I would steer clear of the question that Robertson and Martin pose in “Culture as Catalyst and Constraint”: “[…W]ho is in charge of what or whom, through what means, and toward what ends?” (507). Their question hinges on the belief that if people can figure out who is constrain- ing whom, then out of mutual respect and continued confrontation, people can make a “genuine change” (509). The problem with this belief is it misleads writers into thinking they can rise “above” their social-ness, above the page, above the discourses at work at any given moment, even above their own selves, manifested in flesh or in black squiggles on white pages. Somehow, it invites or encourages the assumption that if we are constructed, then we are constructed like a house—and that the solution to any power structure problem is really just a matter of moving things around—which is, frankly, overly simplistic. We miss the mark (and likely get ourselves into trouble) if we assume that we can just ac- cept or reject social influences (“I will not be gendered today!”) or that the game will fundamentally change with another captain calling the shots or, worse, that we can change the game from the sidelines.
The bottom line is that in the conceptualization of subjectivity I’ve traced out in this chapter, the writer, the essayist, is privileged as the creator, conveyor, tyrant of the text and of the self that may show up on a page. Consequently, I would argue that those of us who may have bought into this conceptualization of the self are only inviting the same sort of tyranny, the sort of self-serving engagement that I saw in the student essay I described at the beginning of this chapter. Couldn’t he argue that he has rejected the prudish codes of conduct and attitudes of one discourse community in order to affirm a different set of codes and attitudes? If so, then not enough has changed in the shift from one con- ception of the writer-page relation to the other. As such, I propose that we ask, instead, what would happen if we worked from the assumption that the subject is not the originator, not the creator, not the actor—at least not in the “arrogant” ways in which we like to pretend that s/he is. How might a subject be constituted in a text, i.e., how is a subject constituted in discourses (e.g., of the essay), in the practices at work in those discourses? And, how might the writer participate in that constituting? In other words, how can we (re)conceptualize subjectivity in the essay in terms that are not reducible to the “old shoe” binary of the essential self v. the socially constructed self?
NOTES
15. I think it worth noting that Bartholomae’s production (with Anthony Petrosky) of Ways of Reading suggests that he, in fact, does think his students capable of be- ing “elegant [and] smart.” The textbook incorporates readings that many first-year
writing teachers would probably see as too sophisticated, too dense, for first-year writers. Yet, here are Bartholomae and Petrosky on the matter: “[…T]his is why a course in reading is also a course in writing. Our students need to learn that there is something they can do once they have first read through a complicated text; suc- cessful reading is not just a matter of ‘getting’ an essay the first time. In a very real sense, you can’t begin to feel the power a reader has until you realize the problems, until you realize that no one ‘gets’ Geertz or Rich or Griffin or Wideman all at once. You work on what you read, and then what you have at the end is something that is yours, something you made” (vii). Clearly, Bartholomae thinks students capable of elegant and smart work, work that at least approximates the scholar’s.
16. See, for example, recent discussions on the WPA listserv about the value of personal writing (a search for “personal writing” in the listserv archives will bring up those discussions).
17. Regarding the value of readers’ responses, Elbow does not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is value for the reader in the writer’s process, but that role is significantly different from the reader-as-critic that I will describe in this chapter. In Writing Without Teachers, Elbow discusses at length the value of receiving peer feedback, i.e., “movies of the mind” from readers, so that the writer, then, can have a clearer understanding of how her work is managing her intentions—if readers are getting from her writing what she wants them to get from it or not. She is then sup- posed to use this feedback to make adjustments to her work so that it aligns better with her intentions. There is also Elbow’s work on the believing/doubting game in which writers challenge and take seriously their own claims—i.e., they play critics to their own works. Both seem to be strategies for encouraging the writer to take full ownership of the text, even of its critique. The major difference in Bartholomae’s and Elbow’s notions of critique seems obvious enough: the former sees it as being most productive if it is rendered by one who understands the topics, values, and beliefs at stake, as well as the discourse within which they are circulating, better than the writer; the former sees critique as being most productive if it is owned (if not rendered from, then accepted or rejected) by the writer.
18. Admittedly, Bartholomae is focused here on what should go on in a first-year composition classroom: what kind of writing should be privileged, what kind of relationship we should be teaching our students to have to their texts, what kind of work they should be doing as writers, etc. Perhaps, as a consequence, it could be argued that the kinds of writers or written selves that are taken up in the debate between Bartholomae and Elbow have little to do with the self of the essayist/essay. I understand this argument, but I disagree. Granted, the goal of Elbow’s classroom (to teach students to express themselves) is different from Bartholomae’s (to teach students to critique culture). On the other hand, these goals are driven by the same impetus—an interest in “student rights” (see Jeanette Harris), or more specifically, an interest in students’ empowerment, which hinges on concepts of agency. I would
argue that essayists have the very same interest.
I, as an essayist, admittedly come at my own empowerment, my own agency, through different means in an essay, than I do as a scholar in my scholarship. I’m addressing a different audience and am expected to work within different genre conventions. However, the basic assumptions about the writer-page relation that are at work in conversations about one genre can speak to those that are at work in conversations about other kinds of writing. For example, is it not interesting that in Technical Writing, the student is expected to keep his/her voice “out” of the writing? Is it not interesting, too, that in a composition course, voice teachers teach students to “find their voices”? The question then becomes: what is the writer-page relationship in each?
To put this in more explicit and applicable terms, it is easy to read the Elbow-Bar- tholomae debate as one of missed lines, i.e., as a debate over totally separate issues: voice and critique. However, I’d argue that the two interests are not mutually exclu- sive in a personal essay, for how critique is conducted has much to do with how a subject is believed to be reflected/constructed on a page and vice versa. This symbi- otic relationship—between subjectivity and critique—will become clearer through- out the course of this chapter, but for the time being, it should suffice to say that what composition teachers have to say about voice and writing speaks in interesting ways to what essayists have to say about voice and the essay and vice versa. This con- versation is worth pursuing in order to discover what the implications of it are, and that pursuit is exactly the impetus behind this chapter.
19. Two particularly interesting works of scholarship that take up the issue of a socially constructed self in personal writing are as follows: Stuart Ching’s “Memo- ry as Travel,” which engages the problematic relationship in creative nonfiction of memory and narrative in a socially constructed identity; and Elisabeth Leonard’s “Assignment #9,” which is an example and exploration of “experimental” writing that specifically engages the concept of a socially constructed self.
20. I hesitate to use the term “discourse communities” because as Joseph Harris says of the latter term “community,” “there is something maddening and vague about the term” (“Community” 6). Given the concession in the field about how “we write not as isolated individuals but as members of communities whose beliefs, concerns, and practices both instigate and constrain” (Harris Teaching 98), though, I have chosen to stick to the term “discourse community.” However, I will use this term in a point- ed way: in order to set up and analyze how the concept of “contact zones” works, a concept that at least professes to disrupt the tyrannizing concept and influence of discourse communities.
I understand and deploy the term “discourse communities” according to the work of Bartholomae and of Patricia Bizzell. Bizzell, in her article “Cognition, Conven- tion, and Certainty,” explains the concept as such: “Groups of society members can
become accustomed to modifying each other’s reasoning and language use in certain ways. Eventually, these familiar ways achieve the status of conventions that bind the group in a discourse community, at work together on some project of interaction with the material world” (214). One such project of interaction with the material world is, of course, the writing classroom.
21. What they learn, too, and what they comment on most to me with each new round of drafts is that a lot of the students’ essays “sound the same.” That is, my stu- dents begin to see the very issues that Bartholomae complains of in “Writing With Teachers,” but for them, the stakes are not so much about participating differently in order to practice critique effectively; rather, for them, the stakes are about doing “something different.” They are pointedly, even passionately, interested in creating works that stand out, that are remarkable.
22. For example, Patricia Bizzell argues, “Healthy discourse communities, like healthy human beings, are also masses of contradictions” (“What” 235). Or to quote Pratt, “People and groups are constituted not by single unified belief systems, but by competing self-contradicting ones” (“Interpretive” 228). These competing beliefs do not change a discourse community’s ability to be recognized as a unit, though. As Harris states, “One does not need consensus to have community” (Teaching 106). 23. Incidentally, this is often the rally-cry for many creative nonfiction advocates (for example, see Lynn Z. Bloom’s “Living to Tell the Tale”).